Drafting a Communication Plan

A crucial part of a successful implementation is effective communication to all stakeholders, both internal and external. UNIwise has extensive experience tailoring communication to fit the needs of your organisation. The purpose of this article is to give you an overview of what is necessary to create successful communication for the implementation of WISEflow and how UNIwise can help you achieve this.

UNIwise will help you optimise the project’s communication with all stakeholders. These five steps can be used in the planning of your communication strategy:

 Step 1: Identify your stakeholders (who)

Many different stakeholders must be considered when implementing WISEflow. The changes to your workflows will affect a wide variety of stakeholders. Identifying all the important stakeholder groups should be your priority. Examples of stakeholders include: students, academics and administrative staff.

 Step 2: Choose the right channels (how)

The appropriate communication channel suitable for each of the stakeholder groups must be identified. Consider how WISEflow will affect their daily workflow and what information they need to manage and understand these changes.

 Step 3: Plan and develop content (your message)

When all relevant stakeholder groups and communication channels have been identified, it is then time to decide what you want to tell your stakeholders. It is important that the content is adapted to each stakeholder group as their relationship to WISEflow and therefore information need will be different from one another. You may consider the following:

• Overall goal: What is the overall strategic goal of your implementation of WISEflow?
• Direction: What do you aim to achieve by implementing WISEflow? What must you achieve for the implementation to be a success?
• Reasons: You will face stakeholders asking why WISEflow is being implemented; it is a good idea for your communication to answer such questions even before they have been explicitly asked. Why have you chosen a digital assessment solution? What is the business case behind the decision?
• Stakeholder specific information: Remember to include information aimed at the individual stakeholder groups to accommodate their specific communicative needs. What does the implementation of WISEflow mean for an administrative employee? How will WISEflow benefit the individual stakeholder groups?
• The next step: Consider whether a schedule for the implementation process will be helpful for the stakeholders. Maybe provide the stakeholder with information about the process and where they can seek further guidance if necessary. 

 Step 4: Plan and execute

In our experience, the number of conflicts can be limited if you ensure sufficient communication to your stakeholder groups from the beginning while involving the necessary stakeholders at the right times during the implementation. Schedule how and when your communication activities will take place and make sure to reach the relevant stakeholders. It is important that all stakeholders are well informed before their daily work is affected by the WISEflow implementation.

 Step 5: Evaluate and improve

After and/or during the execution of your communication plan, it is a good idea to evaluate if the communication seems sufficient. This can lead to second rounds of communication to any or all stakeholder groups to ensure that all are sufficiently informed during the implementation process with WISEflow.

• Be proactive: Remember that your stakeholders prefer too much communication rather than too little.
• Visual communication: Use T-shirts, flyers and other visual aids to create visually engaging communication.
• Remember the order of your communication: It is important to schedule your communication, so stakeholders are engaged in the correct order. Managers, for example, should be properly informed in advance, to be able to answer their employees’ questions.
• Transparency: It is often advantageous to make the communication strategy available for all stakeholders. This ensures, for example, that your assessors know what information the students have received. In other words, who communicates what and when does this take place?
• Follow-up: Tell your success stories.